1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to devices and processes that track the production and utilization of an individual that works for an organization, such as a business.
2. Related Art
It is a well known for an organization, such as a business, to track the productivity of its employees. Such tracking entails having an employee record the hours that he or she works during a day of work. Such recording can include either the total number of hours worked during the day or the number of hours worked on each project worked during the day. Such recording does not include recording the number of units processed or completed during each project. Thus, it is not possible to calculate productivity and utilization via calculating productive hour productivity which requires the factors of: 1) the direct task being worked, 2) the direct time applied to the direct task during that session of work and 3) the number of units processed or units completed.
There are various examples of known tracking systems/tools that are incapable of calculating productivity and utilization. For example, Accenture's Service Management Suite captures time based on Accenture's WBS internal accounting code elements. Such capturing is inadequate for the purpose of calculating productivity and utilization since WBS elements are placed at too high of a level to give visibility into the time applied to a single task and the number of units completed during that specific session of work.
Another example of a tracking tool/system is Microsoft's Project Web Access that captures time based on projects and their sub-tasks. While the tool is effective in supporting a multi-tier project model by both 1) capturing time at a task level as well as 2) rolling up time for higher level reporting, it is inadequate for the purposes of calculating productivity and utilization. In particular, productivity and utilization cannot be calculated without capturing both the time applied to a single task and the number of units completed.
Yet another example of a tracking tool/system is the project-based costing tool known as Greenbook. While Greenbook is effective in supporting multi-tiered project costing, it is inadequate because calculating productivity and utilization requires both the time applied and the number of units completed.
Besides the inability of calculating productivity and utilization, known tracking tools/systems, are incapable of performing data analysis regarding multiple individual productivity parameters, such as 1) measuring individual performance against the “Speed of the Process”, 2) managing utilization by person by team, 3) capacity planning and real-time line-balancing decisions, 4) forecasting when there is variation in capacity or demand, 5) measuring monthly production (client demand) trends by person by process by day, 6) calculating process cycle efficiency (total direct time/cycle time), 7) evaluating total time applied to tasks which are common to multiple value streams (complexity) and 8) completing calculations needed for implementing workload levelling.